Howard the Duck

There's good stuff around the edges of the film -- all that word play and all those visual gags demand that you pay attention lest you miss something even in the slow scenes. But at the center, no magic. [01 Aug 1986, p.D1]

Howard the Duck manages to be two or three types of fun: as a crazy comedy, it has some good risque/sick jokes to go along with its messy slapstick and bland rock music; as a monster movie, it has an outstanding performance from Jeffrey Jones as a scientist-cum-monster and an astonishingly repulsive Dark Overlord of the Universe shows up for the exciting climax. Read full review

There's something kitschy about Howard the Duck that makes it fun to watch. It tried hard and provided you're not a huge stick in the mud, there's something in this movie for everyone. Read full review

In Howard the Duck, the special effects -- and the Muppety duck jokes -- command so much attention that it's easy to overlook the movie makers' clever narrative touches. It's rather fitting, for example, that Howard is shown to be almost as much of a misfit on the duck world as he is on Earth. And there's a sometimes-touching, sometimes-hilarious Fay Wray-King Kong relationship established between Howard and a sexy, baby-faced rock singer named Beverly (Lea Thompson). The main reason the relationship is so intriguing is that Thompson always keeps you guessing about her character's true feelings for the cantankerous bird. It's hard to fault the tongue-in-bill high spirits of a movie like Howard the Duck. Read full review

Howard the Duck' begins as a mild satire about a duck who fell to earth, but midway through, the star is upstaged by horrifying demons and dazzling light shows. Read full review

Pic lapses into formulaic predictability with nearly an hour of frenetic chase scenes and technically perfect explosions from Industrial Light & Magic. Action comes sporadically alive in scenes with scientist Jones, who becomes possessed by the spirit of an evil Dark Warlord that entered his body during the same fateful mishap that brought Howard to Earth. There is an abundant amount of special effects wizardry that emanates mostly from Jones as he transforms into a monster, but it is not spectacularly unique enough to distinguish this film from other, more entertaining, sci-fi thrillers. Read full review

The imagination of the opening is a hint of what the movie might have been: a view of our world that made kids consider it from another angle--as well as a spoof of the superhero. But what are all the pleasant duck effects in the face of any of this numbing waste? Read full review

When the filmmakers grow tired of fowl puns -- about an hour after the audience does -- they switch to space opera, and Howard battles a scientist (Jeffrey Jones, funny against all odds) whose body is invaded by a giant lobster-scorpion space troll. Read full review

The film resembles one of those Saturday Night Live sketches that has one joke and keeps going, and going, and going. Read full review

The problem was that it was supposed to be animated, but contractual obligations forced it to become a live-action movie — specifically, an unfunny, effects-driven, story-deprived live-action film about a talking duck. Read full review

There are a couple of mildly amusing moments, but overall Howard the Duck is a monumental waste of time. Read full review

Howard The Duck has several jokes, really, they're all just desperately unfunny. Read full review

When the smoke clears, only one thing is certain: Howard the Duck has laid an egg. Read full review

Huyck's direction is resolutely uninvolved—every shot of every arrhythmically paced scene cries out for instant anonymity—and only Jeffrey Jones's sardonic scenery chewing as an archetypally deranged scientist keeps things marginally watchable. Lea Thompson is completely out of her element as Howard's sexpot girlfriend (though graduated, thankfully, from the treacly virginality of SpaceCamp), and as for the guy(s) in the duck suit . . . well, he/they deserve our condolences and prayers. Read full review

The story has no center; the duck is not likable, and the costly, overwrought, laser-filled special effects that conclude the movie are less impressive than a sparkler on a birthday cake. Read full review

Howard the Duck is the end of the line: any more infantile than this, and the filmmakers are going to vanish into the nearest womb. As a comedy, Howard the Duck is less humorous than that well- known Lucas laugh riot, Return of the Jedi, but it is good at one thing - wasting money. [02 Aug 1986, p.D9]

As you watch Howard the Duck, you get the vivid sensation that you're watching not a movie, but a pile of money being poured down the drain. [02 Aug 1986, p.G10]

Howard the Duck is a bad movie. It doesn’t work as a comic book adaptation, a comedy, an action/adventure film, a fantasy/science fiction pastiche, or a combination of any of the above. The humor is juvenile. The action is cheesy and unexciting. The costume is embarrassing. The script feels like it was cobbled together by people with no knowledge of comic books but who were pretending expertise. Read full review

Howard the Duck, the movie, is as bad as you've heard. Actually, it's worse. But its failings as a film have overshadowed the frequently brilliant 1970s comic book that inspired it. Using only the most superficial elements of its source material while discarding most of what made the comic interesting, the film serves as a textbook example of how to turn something into nothing. Read full review

Howard T Duck, of Marvel Comics, might well have a beef against Lucasfilm for transforming his magnetic comic strip personality into a zipperless polyester duck-suit (filled interchangeably by eight different actors, each apparently under four feet in height) in this aimless movie. Read full review

Nothing about the film works. And the festering boil on this arse-end of cinematic quality is the duck suit itself: it’s about as realistic as a builder’s quote, with less than a tenth of the aesthetic charm of the same builder’s bum cleavage. Read full review

The first half concerns our hero's satirical misadventures on earth, except that director Huyck has the comic finesse of Hulk Hogan. The second half is an overproduced orgy of car crashes and monsters, in which Howard must save the world from the Dark Overlords of the universe. George Lucas was the executive producer. The Force was not with him. [25 Aug 1986, p.63]